Monday, March 29, 2010

commenter reading comprehension corrective

The collective reading comprehension of the Internet is as sharp as ever, and so I am writing a reply to some of my tired and predictable critics in the comments of my recent post on skepticism.

The most repeated and yet least defensible claim is the hoary old argument towards self-refutation. This trope is evergreen, it appears. Many commenters are taking the tack, "you are saying with certainty that you can't have certainty!" or "you are saying without doubt that we must always have doubt!" or some such. I really have a hard time knowing how to address this failure of reading comprehension: I defy anyone, really, to find a single statement in that post that is expressed in a way that declares itself certain, lacking doubt, atemporal, non-contingent or objective. Take your time; I'll wait. I don't think you're going to find anything. I am quite disciplined on this subject; I've done this dance before. To the point of distraction, I point out the contingent and subjective nature of my own claims, but I have to, because even having done so, you get this same old insistence that I am being certain about uncertainty. I'm not. Please, if it really is unclear from all of the verbiage that I expended on this issue: there is no position or idea that I expressed within that post that I intended as objective, certain, indubitable, atemporal, or non-contingent.

That I was so careful on that score, but that people still launched into the boring old self-refutation gambit again-- and it is boring; despite the fact that so many commenters insist on thinking that they have cracked some kind of code, it is literally ancient, Plato having made a version of it-- I think that reveals a tendency I see more and more on the Internet: there is a large crowd of readers and commenters who read entirely through a kind of reverse shorthand, where they take any post that vaguely resembles a post they've read somewhere else, and respond to it as though it were that earlier post. So John Q. Commenter says, "Aha! I remember someone once say, 'I am certain there is no such thing as certainty,' and boy didn't I give it to that guy in the comments! To the Batmobile!" Well, I'm sorry folks, but you've got to work a little harder than that. Saying over and over that I was expressing certainty doesn't change the fact that I intended no such thing.

Now, if you'd care to read a book or two, you could see that the self-refutation charge has been discussed at length and considered before. Suppose I hadn't been as scrupulous as I was in avoiding making certain or objective truth claims in my post questioning the pragmatic value of truth claims. Suppose I had said the descriptive phrase, "there are no certain truth claims," or the prescriptive phrase, "we should proceed as though we know nothing for certain." This is the sort of thing that those who want to enforce strong truth claim visions of human knowledge jump all over. But are they really self-contradicting? Only if you assume exactly the vision of truth that I am denying. If you assume that the statement "metanarratives are untrue" means "it is objectively and non-contingently true that strong truth claims are untrue," then yes, that would be self-contradicting; but assuming that is to beg the question. To talk as though it is always the case that descriptive or prescriptive language makes appeals to objective truth is to assume exactly the vision of truth that I am telling you I don't assume. If I said, "metanarratives are untrue," I would mean "from my subjective standpoint, I find it useful not to take metanarratives as transcendentally true." And in the context of that post, you should be able to figure that out; after all, I was busy telling you that this was how I look at truth claims.

If you do some reading-- I've recommended Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy in this space before-- you'll find many responses to the self-refutation charge, much better argued than mine. Most or all point out the above, that these claims are ultimately usually tautological or question begging, because they are internally consistent only if one assumes the vision of objective knowledge that is being rejected by the claims that are called self-refuting. People have pointed that out for a long time, and indeed Plato has come under criticism for that. If that is the only arrow in your quiver, ladies and gentlemen, then please, don't bring that weak shit to the rim here. Again: any claim I make, as I keep pointing out, is itself a subjective and contingent claim. I make no claim to certain or objective truth with anything I am here saying.

One commenter claims that I am wrong to call evolution random and directionless. I suppose this depends on how exactly you mean those things. Evolving species will proceed over time through natural selection to being more fit with their environment, but this evolution is the product of functionally random mutation, and no particular evolution ever has to happen. Evolution does not produce perfectly fit organisms, it merely eliminates those so unfit that it prevents survival. What's more, natural selection conditions species through their exposure to their environment, which is itself conditioned through random events. A species might be very well adapted to its environment, but a random environmental change occurs that renders it poorly adapted. If natural selection does not have the time to condition the animal to be more suited to its environment through the superior ability to propagate of animals with beneficial mutation, the species will die out. If it does have time, that evolution will have been the product of random changes in the environment.

Speaking of self-refutation, we've got some of that rare but funny tendency on the Internet for multiple commenters to criticize the same author but from entirely different directions. So you've got the self-refutation crowd who thinks that what I am saying is self-evidently contradictory, and then you've got people who are saying that "everybody knows" what I am saying and I'm not making any important points.

To those who say that I am not disagreeing with Harris, I'm a bit confused: here I am, disagreeing with him. Harris claims that, despite uncertainty and a multiplicity of moral actions, we can make objectively moral or immoral actions or statements. I don't believe in transcendent morality of any kind. Morality, to my lights, is best thought of as an agreement between people, which is therefore never certain, timeless, or transcendent. I think it is to our practical benefit to act as though there is no moral value that transcends limited human agreement. Which means, yes, I am incapable of saying that the Taliban is objectively or certainly of inferior moral value to the Dalai Llama. And if you'd like to haul out the high school debating team tactic, no, I can't say that Hitler, the Holocaust or Nazism are permanently, objectively and non-contingently evil in some transcendent way.

That doesn't mean that I don't consider them evil, or that I can't fight them, or that my feelings towards Nazism and the obligation to fight it are any less passionate or committed. Not at all. It merely means that I find the genesis of that opposition and that passion to be within the subjective framework of my own life. This is part of the problem again: people insist that saying, for example, that scientific truth is socially constructed represents some great insult to science, but it only would be if you maintain belief in a transcendent truth that socially constructed truth can be compared to. I don't. From my perspective, use visions of truth are actually more respectful of science, because science is fantastically useful.

Ultimately, it's the very anger that the comments section contains that suggests that there is something to what I am saying. It's like clockwork: you say, "people get upset when you question the reach of the human mind," and then people show up and lose their shit because you've questioned the reach of the human mind. To call the comments section uncharitable would be an understatement, wouldn't you say? Why? Because this stuff is very, very sensitive for people. It really makes people unhappy. And this is in a context with my beliefs, which are wonderfully capable of existing alongside alternative visions of the truth. I am happy for you to go on believing in the transcendent power of the human mind; there is space for that within my position because, again, I am making no claim with objective certainty. I am not saying that it is objectively the case that there is no objective human knowledge. I am merely saying that for the pragmatic benefit of mankind, it seems to me that epistemological modesty is a very beneficial resource, and further that it seems to me that people get upset if you say so. When you show up in the comments and start flipping your wig to say it isn't true, I wonder if you all appreciate the irony.

Finally, some insisted that this was just my insecurity at being in the humanities and not the sciences. While I am a humanities man at heart, and will defend them to the day I die, I am actually in the social sciences, and I am in the process of being credentialed as a quantitative researcher. My academic coursework these days largely revolves around research methods and statistics. That isn't to make any claim to any kind of hierarchy of knowledge. It's just to dispute a particularly reductive explanation for why I think what I do.

185 comments:

I suppose you could say that I am making one truth claim with superior force compare to anything else I am saying: claims about my own thinking or intention. That's because my own cognition is the one aspect of my life that appears unmediated to me.

If it helps, it's not like scientists are particularly certain about the stuff they are publishing. I feel pretty good about the articles I've been on, but they're probably wrong in some way. Generally, I would say scientific questions that can be immediately answered with established equipment and methods are not really worth funding. But yeah, it's nice to have empirical data to argue about. It takes some of the bullshit out of the academic discourse.

"That doesn't mean that I don't consider them evil, or that I can't fight them, or that my feelings towards Nazism and the obligation to fight it are any less passionate or committed."

How far does this humility - possibly crossing into timidity, it's hard to tell - extend? Do you think the framers of the Constitution were presumptuous in assuming they could embed moral principles in a document that not only governed millions at the time, but hundreds of millions over the course of a couple of centuries?

What about "crimes against humanity"? Do you think that concept has good reason to exist?

This entire post and Primeau's response to the comments from the previous thread highlight the reason I reacted to your writing so negatively, Freddie (I can only speak to my own perceptions, of course.): arrogant tone combined with misapprehension.

Your response to reader comments is apropos of about 50% of the points they raised and misinterprets some of that. You accuse your readership (as ephemeral as that group might be) of perfunctory reading and then engage in the same thing. The very fact that the word 'accuse' is descriptive of your post speaks to your dearth of regular readers.

Primeau, apparently you did not read the dialogue above the commenter you quote nor Freddie's post (a post that jumps to Nazism as the logical end of Harris's thinking early and often). Matunos's comment was clearly an illustration of the 'ridiculous trope' of DeBoer...but you'd have to read and comprehend to know that.

Here's to hoping the Dish readership won't be seeing any more links. I certainly won't be following them.

Of course I do; what I would say is that crimes against humanity are not defined by appealing to some extra-human morality that exists somewhere "out there" but rather in the vague, nebulous place we call human agreement. And, yes, to answer the obvious question-- that does mean that if humans give up on the idea that, say, genocide is wrong, then that will become the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.

Look, in practical terms, this is all pretty minor stuff. Philosophically, I think it's important, and I do think that there are actual real world effects based on the framework under which we understand morality. But a morality so conceived will be, on material terms, very similar, I imagine to Sam Harris's, or any average person on the street. To the specific charge that I'm not saying much, I don't have much of a defense.

re paragraph 1 you write: "I really have a hard time knowing how to address this failure of reading comprehension: I defy anyone, really, to find a single statement in that post that is expressed in a way that declares itself certain, lacking doubt, atemporal, non-contingent or objective."

Let me play. I assume noting that both the above sentences assert things with certainty won't help me win. Your defiance of our ability to find such a sentence belies your epistemic humility. If you weren't so certain of yourself and your claims, you couldn't have such an attitude. I digress.

Here is one such sentence from the last post (I also posted this on the other page):

"Suppose there is, actually, a transcendent morality, a right and wrong that is capital-t True, that is non-contingent, not temporal, that applies to each and every person and situation: then totalitarianism must become the truth of man"

Could you explain how the claim that something necessarily follows from something else is not a claim to objective epistemic authority? Here is why I think it is. This isn't a hedged claim. You say, if X is true, then Y MUST be true. This is a conditional with a very strong connective. Now you don't think X is true and I am not criticizing you for that. I am interested in the connection between the two ideas. You seem to be quite sure that the connection exists (and is as strong as you say it is). The connection isn't stated with epistemic modesty, or humility. You state that the connection exists with 100%, absolute certainty.

Quick question. Are you giving up objective truth, epistemic justification, epistemic certainty, or some combination of the three? I appreciate you having this discussion but you are all over the place.

When you say: "If I said, "metanarratives are untrue," I would mean "from my subjective standpoint, I find it useful not to take metanarratives as transcendentally true."

Could you elaborate on the truth predicate here? Your analysis tells me that you think falsity is best cashed out in terms of objective facts about yourself and what you find useful to take as true. But you don't say anything about what it is to take something to be true. Do you have a pragmatic notion of truth in mind such that x is true iff I find it useful to believe x?

Here is some advice: if by 'grass is green' you mean 'It is useful for me to believe that grass is green' then just use the latter sentence. It more clearly conveys what you mean and will lead to considerably less confusion.

Here is another piece of advice: You need to take the self-refuting charge more seriously. Yes it is unoriginal. Yes it is old. Yes it has been discussed in recent books. You say that it can be ignored for these very reasons. But the self-refuting charge is discussed in recent books BECAUSE it can't be ignored. Why would someone write a book and another person publish a book on something that was settled long ago? Furthermore, you can't just point to a recent discussion and assume that it was successful in refuting the charge. That is to be dismissive of a serious problem (so serious it has been discussed for 2500 years!).

Here is the rub: "there aren't any objective truths" sure looks like an objective truth in whatever sense of objective or truth you can find. "There isn't any knowledge" sure looks like a claim to knowledge. Arguing for these views is hard. It is hard precisely because they look like they are self-refuting. Don't be surprised if you advocate such views and people find worries. They find worries because there are worries. Does this mean such views are false? It looks that way. But if you can articulate why the problem doesn't exist, we might be satisfied. Making a bad argument from authority isn't enough.

Freddie made a reasonable reference to Nazism. The commenter -- awfully ill-humored or simply stupid, I can't tell -- jumped immediately to the supreme piece of e-idiocy that is Godwin's Law.

"Here's to hoping the Dish readership won't be seeing any more links."

Agreed!

I quit reading the Dish (after five or six years of regular perusal) specifically to avoid Sullivan's unbearable pandering to self-righteous, snot-nosed twits like yourself, who descend upon Freddie's blog like so many locusts whenever old Andrew has a moment of clarity and actually links to a halfway decent thinker.

The skeptic doesn't deny man's ability to reach discrete truths after significant empirical observation, but he does insist that we recognize any supposedly definitive conclusions as the product of an often faulty biological processor whose contact with the objects of its analyses is mediated through dense and wildly distorting cultural and biological filters. We're working on a second hand basis here -- at best.

The funny thing about devout atheists is that many tend to be human triumphalists, with utopian -- borderline religious -- philosophies of the mind (or brain, depending). This from the same people who conceive of us as beasts pure and simple, the kith and kin of apes. Yet grandiose imaginings of our mental capacity persist in that camp. Consider Hitchens, whose sense of "right" and "wrong" is hyper-cultivated, and who possesses fraternal ideal that would put to shame the most zealous Christian millenarian.

I think science has managed to arrive at a number of impressively sound conclusions. Of course, most every one of them emerged in the last 2 or 3 of our species' 2000 centuries. And only with the ceaseless struggle of a class of highly intelligent specialists working 'round the clock.

Even those truths which appear most secure I take with a large grain of salt. After all, we're frail animals with limited perceptions, unstable starting points, shoddy reasoning powers; animals bound always to look through a mirror, darkly.

Put simply, when it comes to truth, our track record isn't very encouraging.

Anonymous, you're conflating "human triumphalists" with humanists, and not providing any reason why some apes (um, yes, we're apes... there's no rational way to contest that) should be incapable of improving ourselves or the world when we've evolved these frontal lobes whose size and structure are unique on earth.

Freddie, your "the commenters are angry and that means I must be right" argument seems to place faulty reasoning on top of a faulty premise.

I am a Sullivan reader, but not because I admire his intellect or thinking process (witness his tortured refusal to disown the Catholic church or explain why no other sect is acceptable to him). I read him because he's very well informed and brings important things to my attention with such frequency, and also because he's more willing than most to admit being wrong. That makes it worth suffering through when he ticks me off with sloppy thinking... That, and how cool I feel when he publishes my emails as "dissent of the day." I do wish he'd have a comment section, but I understand his reasons not to. Not to mention that would turn his blog into an inescapable timesink.

I think it is to our practical benefit to act as though there is no moral value that transcends limited human agreement. Which means, yes, I am incapable of saying that the Taliban is objectively or certainly of inferior moral value to the Dalai Llama. And if you'd like to haul out the high school debating team tactic, no, I can't say that Hitler, the Holocaust or Nazism are permanently, objectively and non-contingently evil in some transcendent way.

So, to use Sam Harris's terms, all moral disagreements boil down to different preferences like chocolate vs. vanilla? OK, that clarifies things. It means, essentially, that Freddie is opting out of the moral discussion and leaving the field to others, including Sam Harris. If you take this position, your only contribution to the moral conversation is going to be some version of "I have a different preference." You can't really participate in organizing a consensus -- a new "limited agreement" -- around that preference. You can't persuade anyone else -- and I guess you mean to say that you have no wish to (this position being mistaken for "humility").

Because, here's the thing: the limited agreements don't come out of nowhere. They come into being for a reason. That reason might be because a critical mass of people sees the moral rule in question as a path to power, or because people are dazzled by a claim of supernatural authority, or because something just seems so prima facie correct that no one thinks to dispute it. (Clearly, the sun goes around the Earth, right?) Sam Harris, at least in the video -- again, I don't know his other work -- is defending a fourth possible basis for limited agreement, one capable of upending the other three: scientific (i.e. repeatable) evaluation of falsifiable fact-claims. (Whoops, no, the sun doesn't actually go around the Earth.)

Because it allows for falsification and has rules for testing and drawing conclusions, this approach IS the "humbler" one. But leave that aside -- does it have any practical benefits? Well, consider the case of race theory. Until the early 20th century, there were various efforts afoot to prove, scientifically, that certain races were superior to others. These involved such operations as weighing brains, taking careful measurements of skulls, administering IQ tests, and other such attempts to find correlations between the traits found in individuals and the "races" they allegedly belonged to. But because, ultimately, the correlations couldn't be found, because the hypotheses could be and were falsified, because not even the key terms (like "race") could be defined with precision, the effort finally collapsed. By the 1920s, Franz Boas and others were able to sweep it aside, consigning skull-measuring to the same dustbin as the geocentric theory or the notion that diseases are caused by a bad "miasma."

This development did not, in itself, instantly change the world for the better. But ultimately it did, because it meant that when political forces began to align against racial supremacy in the Civil Rights era, the racists couldn't plausibly appeal to scientific authority; you didn't have the scientific community entering the fray and declaring racial equality to be somehow a violation of the "fact" that some races are inferior to others. To the contrary, science supported the position of the anti-racists, making it easier for them to win the political argument -- and thus helping underwrite the emerging new "limited agreement" that equality among peoples of different skin colors (and skull sizes) is a goal to which our society should be committed.

Sure, you can look at a history like this and say, Who cares? Jim Crow is vanilla; racial equality is chocolate; there's no "transcendent" basis for preferring one to the other, and therefore there's no reasoned way of adjudicating between them at all. Once the segregationists lost the scientific argument, this is essentially what they fell back on: We have our "culture," it includes racial oppression, and who's to say that's bad? If you don't like it, then go organize your own states / societies in your own ways and just leave us alone. And, in Freddie's terms, they're right -- there's no reasoned response to that, just an exercise of power in outvoting and overruling them. Sam Harris is saying, no, we can demonstrate scientifically that people do not flourish as well under conditions of racial apartheid as they do under more equal arrangements. That claim may be wrong -- if it's offered as science, it must necessarily be falsifiable -- but I suspect that Harris is right in assuming that the moral conversation belongs to those who are willing to engage it, not just shrug and say that we have nothing but personal preferences and can never adjudicate among moral claims.

I can see why you think it's ironic that your call for epistemological modesty has been met with the very epistemological certainty you were arguing against, but I don't think it's ironic at all - it follows naturally, from their premises and yours.

Without question, you've been clear and consistent throughout: you don't claim objective, non-contingent truth for anything. It's not that you deny it (as the self-refuters charge); it is simply a claim you do not make, or cannot make, since it is made in a language you do not speak and the one you do (contingent subjective agreement) precludes it. From your perspective, charges of self-contradiction aren't even wrong - they're nonsensical, and the people making the charges only illustrate the characteristics typical of their delusion (e.g. anger that their grasp of objective truth is being questioned).

But maybe they're not just acting (ironically) like you said they would. You say, "To talk as though it is always the case that descriptive or prescriptive language makes appeals to objective truth is to assume exactly the vision of truth that I am telling you I don't assume." But for your detractors, declining to assume this appeal to objective truth is itself a negation of objective truth (why else would you decline to assume it?), and in negating it, you acknowledge that it is there to negate. Charges of performative contradiction follow, etc.

So to their mind, objectively, non-contingently true statements exist, which can be negated only by ANOTHER objectively, non-contingently true statement that they don't (declining to grant the premise suffices), whereas for you, nothing is objective, nothing is non-contingently true, and this applies to (farcically) "objective" truths most of all.

Of course this is a very old argument and gets nowhere fast. Stanley Fish replayed the argument pretty recently in "The Trouble with Principle," and there was Rorty et al. before (in some cases long before) that. (I knew one of Rorty's college teachers. He was still convinced that Rorty contradicted himself every time he opened his mouth.) These positions could not be more opposed, but they do have this in common: they begin and proceed axiomatically, and they will always be talking past each other. I'm pretty sure about that.

For Rorty, there is only solidarity, that is, people who decide to speak the same language, value the same things, make the same ontological, epistemological, and moral assumptions. But among the brothers in solidarity, people can contradict themselves. These brothers can disagree. Brother can be wrong. If you are to be in solidarity with others, you need to acknowledge and respond to the standards set by our brotherhood. The first one is intellectual consistency.

Rorty knew it was difficult to articulate his position. He knew he faced serious problems with self-refutation. He spent a lot of time worrying about it. Take heed. All people who advocate for epistemological modesty and the claim that there are no universal epistemological truths are going to face a problem of self-refutation. This is straigtforward. Your brothers in solidarity demand self-consistency. Get it or leave the union.

"And, yes, to answer the obvious question-- that does mean that if humans give up on the idea that, say, genocide is wrong, then that will become the truth of man, and so much the worse for us."

So it's kind of a majority vote thing.

But let's take a classic cultural universal like rules against incest. What's the real difference between incest being "objectively" wrong and wrong by consensus? If the expression of universal moral consensus is exactly like objective moral truth when viewed from the outside, is it actually different in essence? How could you tell?

"Look, in practical terms, this is all pretty minor stuff. Philosophically, I think it's important, and I do think that there are actual real world effects based on the framework under which we understand morality. But a morality so conceived will be, on material terms, very similar, I imagine to Sam Harris's, or any average person on the street. To the specific charge that I'm not saying much, I don't have much of a defense."

I agree that it's important. But I think what I hear you saying is, Sam Harris is annoying in his certainty. Not just annoying but wrong. But launching off from his starting point or your starting point, you get to pretty much the same place. And then you're saying you're not saying much.

Maybe morality is a particle and a wave, nature and nurture, yin and yang, and you're both right. If you admit a quality of a painting, say, can be objective, what makes morality so special that no objective claims can be made?

"From thepoint of view of pragmatism, the notion that our beliefs might "correspondwith reality" is absurd. Beliefs are simply tools for making one's way in the world. Does a hammer correspond with reality? No. It has merely proven its usefulness for certain tasks. So it is, we are told, with the "truths" of biology, history, or any other field. For the pragmatist, the utility of a belief trumps all other concerns, even the concern for coherence.18 If a literalist reading of the Bible works for you on Sundays, while agnosticism about God is better suited to Mondays at the office, there is no reason to worry about the resulting contradictions in your worldview. These are not so much incompatible claims about the way the world is as different styles of talking, each suited to a particular occasion.If all of this seems rather academic, it might be interesting to note that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization. He thought that it would, in Berman's phrase, "undermine America's ability to fend off its enemies." There may be some truth to this assertion. Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right—about anything—seems a recipe for the Endof Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction,while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be "true" or "false" not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts. Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there aretruths waiting to be discovered—and thus we can be right or wrongin our beliefs about them.

According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare our description of reality with a piece of undescribed reality. As Jürgen Habermas says, "since the truth of beliefs or sentences can in turn be justified only with the help of other beliefs and sentences, we cannot break free from the magic circle of our language." This is a clever thesis. But is it true? The fact that language is the medium in which our knowledge is represented and communicated says nothing at all about the possibilities of unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no experience when talked about escapes being mediated by language (this is a tautology) does not mean that all cognition, and hence all knowing, isinterpretative. If it were possible for any facet of reality to be knownperfectly—if certain mystics, for instance, were right to think thatthey had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of transcendental truths—then pragmatism would be just plain wrong, realistically. The problem for the pragmatist is not that such a mystic stands a good chance of being right. The problem is that, whether the mystic is right or wrong, he must be right or wrong realistically. In opposing the idea that we can know reality directly, the pragmatist has made a covert, realistic claim about the limits of human knowledge. Pragmatism amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility of realism. And so, like the relativist, the pragmatist appears to reach a contradiction before he has even laced his shoes."

I'm name dropping a quote, but I think it fits well to this discussion:

"But should not a society of clergymen, for example an ecclesiastical synod or a venerable presbytery (as the Dutch call it), be entitled to commit itself by oath to a certain unalterable set of doctrines, in order to secure for all time a constant guardianship over each of its members, and through them over the people?

I reply that this is quite impossible.

A contract of this kind,concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment.

This would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress.

Later generations are thus perfectly entitled to dismiss these agreements as unauthorized and criminal.

To test whether any particular measure can be agreed upon as a law for a people, we need only ask whether a people could well impose such a law upon itself. This might well be possible for a specified short period as a means of introducing a certain order, pending, as it were, a better solution. This wouldalso mean that each citizen, particularly the clergyman, would be given a free hand as a scholar to comment publicly, i.e. in his writings, on the inadequacies of current institutions.

Meanwhile, the newly established order would continue to exist, until public insight into the nature of such matters had progressed and proved itself to the point where, by general consent (if not unanimously), a proposal could be submitted to the crown. This would seek to protect the congregations who had, for instance, agreed to alter their religious establishment in accordance with their own notions of what higher insight is, but it would not try to obstruct those who wanted to let things remain as before.

But it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man's upward progress, thus making it fruitless and even detrimental to subsequent generations. A man may for his own person, and even then only for a limited period, postpone enlightening himself in matters he ought to know about.

But to renounce such enlightenment completely, whether for his own person or even more so for later generations, means violating and trampling underfoot the sacred rights of mankind." - Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?" Konigsberg in Prussia, 30th September, 1784

"Edifyng philosophers have to decry the notion of having a view, while avoiding a view about having views. This is an awkward, but not impossible, position."-- Richard Rorty, "edifying philosopher"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 1979, p 371.

"And if you'd like to haul out the high school debating team tactic, no, I can't say that Hitler, the Holocaust or Nazism are permanently, objectively and non-contingently evil in some transcendent way.

That doesn't mean that I don't consider them evil, or that I can't fight them, or that my feelings towards Nazism and the obligation to fight it are any less passionate or committed. Not at all. It merely means that I find the genesis of that opposition and that passion to be within the subjective framework of my own life."

You want to have it both ways. That is what is boring. As soon as you make a claim with some kind of force to it, like in the first sentence above, you back down, and claim that it doesn't really have that much force, like in the second sentence. This is moral relativism at its most transparent: fear of saying anything at all about anything. The question is, if you don't want to say anything about anything, why are you taking so long to say it?

Eh, I largely agree with Freddy's stance, but being a contrarian bastard, reading a point of view I largely agree with always makes me being to formulate objections...

What occurs to me this time is this: Is it possible to experience one's own fundamental beliefs other than with certainty? Eg, while it is both possible and healthy to believe that pure objective truth may not be able to be apprehended by this hunk of meat between my ears, I don't know if it is possible to not feel sure about that. "Feel," and "be" are different, of course. This of course, may be why the 2,500 year old argument can never be settled; we are wired to feel certain of our beliefs, just as we experience beauty or love.

Followed link from Sully and when tab opened, thought: Aha, there's a really interesting blog I'd meant to re-visit!

Why do you think it's so difficult for people to understand the concept of anti-representationalism (if that's what you'd term the school of philosophy with which you're aligned)?

I've had this same - yes, tedious! - conversation a few times over the years. One of the more interesting versions of the exchange was with someone who'd taken a philosophy seminar with Rorty. He & his friends concluded it was all very interesting but nobody could possibly live as though they believed it. Which I later realized explained his intense interest in how I thought.

I finally decided to read some Rorty and thought, "Of course! Yes! Ditto!"

But I confess I really don't see why people always want to think there's some massive self-deception or rhetorical trickery or moral cowardice involved

As though to say, Yes yes it's all very well and good to be cautious or humble about claims of objective truth but why can't you just admit you really do believe in some eternal, external reality? We get it, you've genuflected in the direction of probity but just admit it for the love of pete! And you protest; and then you might hear yourself described as amoral or a moral relativist or secular humanist or some other -ist that's spat out like a slur.

"I find the genesis of that opposition [to Hitler, the Holocaust and Nazism] and that passion to be within the subjective framework of my own life."

What I think Sam Harris is saying is that science can be applied to the subjective framework of people's lives. If you are a materialist, as Harris is, then you must believe that your subjective framework contained entirely within your skull. What I believe he is arguing, then, is that the conditions under which your well-being (regardless of the definition of well-being) is maximized can, in principle, be defined, that many of those conditions will apply to humanity at large (which is an empirical claim, which can be proven true or false for each condition in question), and thus knowing such facts can inform an objective moral system (objective in the sense that it's defined outside of the confines of solipsism). Then, you don't need to only oppose Nazism on the basis of your personal, subjective moral framework, but you can make empirical arguments about why Nazism is morally wrong.

Harris might say you can always make conclusive arguments this way. I'm skeptical of that, but I would at least say you can make useful arguments.

As for the reactions regarding the question of certainty, which you feel are unfairly directed toward you, I can only offer speculation: Claims to moral authority exist today, in the form of religions, customs, etc. A scientifically-based claim to moral authority would not, I think, be any *less* justified than those other claims, and insofar as the science is good, might even be better. Thus, I think the (perhaps invalid) assumption that many readers may be jumping to is that your vehement objection to Harris lies in the fear that science carries with it a certain implicit sense of certainty (even though actual scientists will go to great lengths to temper this notion), and thus bad science, when not exposed as such, can do worse damage than bad religion, because in this day and age, many (I wish I could say most) people trust scientific-sounding claims more than they trust religious claims. If Harris' line of reasoning leads to totalitarianism, then why haven't the millenia-old religions we already have led to totalitarianism (or, at least, sustained totalitarianism)?

(For my part, I don't presume that your objections are based on this implied certainty. It doesn't seem like you lend any greater credence to those other moral authorities, but rather eschew all claims of moral authority.)

I actually think that both you and Harris are correct, though neither of you might accept my position. Applying (proper) science to the question of morality is at least as valid as relying on customs or religions. If so, then it can at least exist within a greater framework of competing moral systems. Consistent what seems to be your perspectivism, one is free to adopt the perspective that science is the best moral authority, to adopt a religious view, or to reject all such views; and others are likewise free to disagree with that individual. Policy can be formed over the objections of one or other viewpoints, within some political framework, as it has been (I presume) since humans developed speech. Personally, I think a scientific view has an extra bonus in that it would have better predictive power over the behavior of those who didn't ascribe to its theory (just like atomic bombs don't care if their targets accept Einstein's relativity).

I'm sorry if you missed the subtlety of my earlier remarks. The paragraph from which you lifted one sentence was about how I felt that Freddie was attacking the credibility of the TED conferences by suggesting that they are divorced from the reality of human suffering. My contention was that, unless Freddie himself is writing his blog from the same ravaged areas he challenges TED to conduct their conferences from, he is guilty of the same crime, and thus somewhat hypocritical.

I believe it's a form of ad hominem. Like the argumentum ad Hitlerum (which I never accused Freddie of making, by the way), it's a common tactic, and I find it it about as tiresome as Freddie apparently finds people saying his argument is self-refuting. My own argumentum ad Hitlerum was pretty obviously (I thought at least) a form of self-deprecating humor.

While blogging, not all of us take ourselves as seriously as you apparently do.

Dov Henis(Comments From The 22nd Century)03.2010 Updated Life Manifest http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/54.page#5065Cosmic Evolution Simplifiedhttp://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/240/122.page#4427"Gravity Is The Monotheism Of The Cosmos"http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/260/122.page#4887